Tag: Nova Scotia

RR: This is a much quieter album in many regards than most of your early input. Skeletonized has this fuzzy drum loop with extremely soft vocals overtop, tracks like Adverse Circumstances and Complex Research are Tom Waits stylized acoustic jams. Hell, even the most chaotic moments like Brilliant Array of Thinking aren’t nearly as aggressive on the onset as something like what we heard on Smock. I think in a lot of ways, the speed of this record (or lack thereof) allowed you to take a breath, and experiment a little bit more, going into more hip-hop oriented circles (yet still I would not consider you to be making rap records at this stage). Do you think that this record served as one of the major stepping stones, and learning experiences for your eventual change into a more hip-hop direction?

Jonhut: I would agree with you. Taking the time to experiment with making slower songs was definitely something that led me to consider a different approach to music. I remember J LaPointe telling me, “You can’t put an acoustic song on an industrial record.” Me being a bit rebellious and stubborn, I did just that.

RR: Ant’s bandcamp shows Musca Antlia Musca as a “radio edit” I can’t imagine any of this material getting radio play. Although this is the most groove-centered song on the record by far, and has a catchy element, I still find it hard to believe considering almost half the track is dedicated to the sounds of people getting tortured haha. Were you getting much, or any for that matter, radio play on this record?

Jonhut:Musca Antlia Musca “radio edit” was titled this way because the original recording went on for about 10 minutes or so. It was also me joking around that my stuff would never actually get played on top 40 radio stations. If my music was played on radio it would have been played at campus stations. During my Recyclone days some of my Jonhut songs were played on university stations, such as CKDU.

RR: This is easiest the shortest release out of the early catalog at 20 minutes. With 7 songs, and most running only a couple minutes in length, were you considering this an EP upon its release?

Jonhut:My main reason for making this EP was to show not only J, but others that you can release any kind of songs no matter what the style or genera. It was a protest album in a way. I wanted to show people that music is music, you don’t have to conform to labels and ideas of what defines an album or an artist. I find it funny looking back that Skinny Puppy released an acoustic track on their 1996 album.

RR: Do you have any stories regarding this release?

Jonhut:Most of this album was recorded at my buddy Dan MacDonald’s apartment when he was in art school. The acoustic songs; Adverse Circumstances and Complex Research were recorded on his back deck. You can hear people talking, birds and cars going by. The song Compatible with the messed up electronic sounds at the end was recorded when I had a bad cold. That’s why my voice was all messed up. The electronic sounds were a broken toy keyboard. “Smallest in the whole world” line was a reference to our record label, Ant Records”.

RR: I’m familiar with three projects of yours from this time period; The Sentinelz, this project, and a rather obscure tape that I’ve heard mentioned called T.I.T.S. Was that the extent of your output in the 90s?

Jesse Dangerously: Yes and no! “Timing Is The Secret” wasn’t actually a tape, it was a pre-MP3, pre-internet digital release in the Impulse Tracker music module format. A zip file of five or six instrumentals made with very short, lo-fi samples, programmed in the style of early Amiga video game music. Somewhere between MIDI and phrase sampling. That was how I started producing music, around age 13, pushing the limits of my extremely remedial grasp of music theory and software that was not quite meant to make the type of music I wanted to make, but technically COULD. I had a few releases like that, there was a small local scene based around sharing them. It was all kids in our local tracking scene, in junior high and high school. That’s where I met Troy (ginzu), on Halifax/Dartmouth BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems), how files and online forums were shared regionally and internationally before everyone had home internet. We’re about the same age, but went to very different schools and had very different immediate social circles. But because we were both making this type of computer music, we got to know one another a bit, and it became clear we both LOVED hip-hop. I think I was more intent on making it, and once I found out he kind of wrote rhymes a bit I pushed him SO HARD to rap with me, which he was reluctant to do. But the more I introduced him to the local hip-hop scene, I think the more accessible and real it felt, like it wouldn’t be so alien for him to do it. It wasn’t all just happening a world away.

So he and I were working on music together before I made the songs that appear on BREAK, and before we made the Sentinels tape, and before everything else. We were a package deal. We did radio shows together, we met Knowself together, Troy would rap and even do vinyl cuts for the jazz band I played drums in. We recorded a song with DJ Moves together (that ultimately, in retrospect, quite rightly didn’t make the cut for the compilation he was working on), I made some beats for Josh Martinez and he made beats for Knowself, that was all in the waning days of the 1990s.

RR: You were going by Jesse PHATS Dangerously on this tape. Basically making “PHATS” the focus on the cover. Was this a name you were identifying with? Was there other material that took the same alias?

Jesse Dangerously: Yeah, my nom-de-BBS from 1992 was “Phatboy,” which came from the most hip-hop themed piece of clothing I was able to find in Halifax back then – a Boy London t-shirt that said “PHATBOY” in bold black letters. Just the fact that it was PHAT with a P.H. had me so excited. It barely fit me, I’m pretty sure it came from a store in the mall I’d never been in before and never would be again. But I wore it all the time in grade 8 and 9, with my giant baggy jeans from Stitches that were the closest thing to what I saw them wearing in rap videos back then, and my boldly patterned boxers pulled WAY up to my fuckin chin, and my hat on tilt just like it always is today, and my long-ass braids, and kids who had bullied me by calling me “hey FAT KID” for years were now calling me “PHATBOY” and it was borderline reclaiming, even though it never really got completely comfortable. I carried that name very deliberately from 92 til 96 or 97, when the BBS scene started to kind of dissipate. I didn’t love having a name that was always refocusing people on one of the attributes that made me the most vulnerable, plus I remember starting to feel less lonely when the kids I met online switched from calling me “Phats” even at in-person meetups to calling me “Jesse,” so I wanted to put that name in my rap name. I liked that it was a little different, I liked that people were a bit perplexed that it seemed to them like a girl’s name (although I didn’t like them being shits about it). So I very impulsively plunked it into the title of a pretty good, but not amazing, Michael Keaton comedy from 1983 that had one of my favourite Weird Al songs on the soundtrack (“This Is The Life,” which briefly interpolates Buffalo Gals by The World Famous Supreme Team!), and since I had been using both names during the time I was working on the songs on the record, I used them both on the cover, as a sort of attempt to segue from one name to another, as though I had a public to hang onto haha.

RR: Who was GrymmFett? He appeared on the track Radioactive MC’s, yet I’ve never come across the name before.

Jesse Dangerously: That’s Troy! His BBS name was Boba Fett, then I think he added “Grymm” spelled like that more in a nod to Too Poetic (the Grym Reapa) from Gravediggaz than like, The Thing or Brothers Grimm or anything. Then all the ginzu stuff came in around Sentinels, which he explained in that interview, and he’s been playing around with that ever since.

Radioactive MCs was the first time I ever managed to drag him over to my place and cajoled him to rap in my parents’ garage, into the 4-track they bought me for my 16th birthday. We made dozens of songs together on that thing. I am so proud of us but I now think he’s right that they were terrible!

RR: The tape itself is split into two sides, the first being “Beats & Emotions” and the second being “Rhymes & Knowledge” do you remember the intent of this decision?

Jesse Dangerously: I mean, part of it is the first evidence of my compulsion to overthink everything I set out to create, and give it rules so it will have boundaries so it can be a box I understand how to fill instead of just leaking all over the ground? I don’t know if the titular acronym “Beats, Rhymes, Emotions, And Knowledge (BREAK)” came before my decision to pair up those concepts for the side titles, but that tape represented me getting to a place in my Impulse Tracker production where I’d developed (with Troy, and my even BESTER friend J Peters who is now a Vancouver trance DJ named Sunkid) techniques for sneaking in samples that were as long as one or two loopable bars, or chopped up hits I could reprogram, and even though I was sampling jazz from the radio and jacking breaks from hip-hop records and compilations as often as I was digging up anything good from my parents’ collection or the legendary Taz Records, so I had as many fully instrumental pieces that were very influenced by DJ Shadow, RZA, Portishead, and the great underground DJ crews like Skratch Piklz and Beat Junkies even if I couldn’t do what they did, as I did songs with vocals. So it was easier to conceive of a full-length album that was divided between the two.

RR: This was recorded from 1996 to the summer of 97’. Why wait the 2 years to release it?

Jesse Dangerously: I can think of two very influential factors in that delay. One is that I was literally a child – I had no income besides my paper route, and I was spending all that money on records, renting Super NES games, and used rap cassettes. But the other is more related to the reason I didn’t release a full length album between 2011 and this year – I have (then undiagnosed & untreated) ADHD, and I have a lot of trouble concentrating on long term goals. It just kept slipping out of my grasp. I joined a band in 97 and I was really excited about that, I got in my first romantic relationships, Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time came out and I had to not only beat them myself but cheer on my mom as she powered through them… writing and recording the songs was super absorbing, and I couldn’t put them down while that was in progress. But once they were done, I didn’t know quite what to do with them. I looked to local indie bands and mentors like Buck 65 and Sixtoo for examples – rent a DAT machine from MusicStop, practice mixing the 4-track tape on the fly until it’s perfect, and then bounce it live to the DAT. Take the DAT to Put It On CD in Dartmouth, so the MacMichael family can duplicate it on cassette. All of those steps came slowly, and while I was learning about them, I was also working on both the Resurrection Brothers and Sentinels records with Troy, which felt more like my main thing.

So I didn’t exactly wait two years, I just feel like it took me two years.

RR: I understand with The Sentinelz the decision would not be entirely in your hands to re-release it, even digitally, however I’m sure this release would be. Why not upload this to a format like Bandcamp for the world to hear? Are tracks like Faggot Flambe (No offense!) really that bad? Haha.

Jesse Dangerously: Yeah this is 100% my baby, and it’s going to make its way back in some form. I’d like to re-bounce the 4-track tapes, which I still have, and get a better mix from one of the talented engineers I know now – of which I knew NONE back then!! – and put it up for my patreon subscribers at least. Maybe a very very limited edition tape. I don’t really want to spread it, because it’s so basic and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I like the idea of people who already care about what I do tracing it back to its earliest versions, seeing my development laid bare, as shaky as it may have been in places. There’s also stuff I was really proud of!

I will say this about “Faggot Flambe” – that’s me. The hook in that messy song includes the line “phatboy, yeah, he talks like faggot” and it was because I got called that ALL the time. I got called that and jumped, I got called that and ridiculed, I got called that and laughed at. And the line came right after a moment I remember now that happened literally on the Halifax Memorial Library steps, same place I would freestyle later (and get called that again in my twenties, haha), when I was walking in the bright sun downtown maybe to dig at the record store or try to see new graffiti, and I overheard someone point me out to whoever they were with, and I knew it was me, because the phrase that lodged in my ear was “yeah right there, the faggot in the braids and glasses.”

So I didn’t have a strong sense of my sexuality then (see: all my songs in the last 5 years, haha) but it was a word I hated, and refused to use against anyone, so I do remember just being like YOU KNOW WHAT, FINE. THAT’S WHO I AM. So I sampled the line that always bothered me in one of my FAVOURITE songs in this days, in Come Clean by Jeru the Damaja when he says “I snatch fake gangster MCs and make them faggot flambe” and I made it a calling card.

The original beat had a loop from my sister’s No Doubt CD, because I liked the phasing guitar on I’m Just A Girl and thought it was transgressive to sample current pop, but I think that version also was made with drums I jacked from the Cut Chemist remix of DJ Shadow’s The Number Song, and by the time the tape was close to being ready I was embarrassed by that and made a new beat from a Santana organ sample, one bass note, and a weirdly chopped drum fill off a rock record.

RR: Do you have any stories regarding the recording of the release?

Jesse Dangerously: Almost all of it was made while skipping school. I was depressed and frustrated and lonely and reclusive in high school, I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be so smart but couldn’t do anything I set my mind to, so I avoided going to the place that made me feel bad constantly by working on music until it was time to go, then making myself late, then having a mild panic attack about the humiliation of being late for no reason again, and straight up locked myself in a room like Bastian in The Never Ending Story to escape into my fantasy world of records, chopping loops, and making words rhyme to the rhythm of the boogie the beat. That displacement of my #1 stress fueled all of the focus that allowed me to make enough material to consider it an album worthy of release.

Almost every time I finished a song, I would dub it down to a cassette and walk around with it in my walkman – walk to school, walk past school, do my paper route (late), head downtown, rewinding and replaying my one song over and over. Those were the days when Buck 65 had his Monday afternoon post-basement open format show on CKDU, and I would head down there to see if he would play the song for me (he was very encouraging), or I would take the tape to Strange Adventures comic shop to see if Sean Jordan (the Wordburglar) was working, and hope he would have a minute to chat and listen to my song behind the counter.

I just wanted to connect with people so bad! I was having a pretty rough time with my mental and emotional health, and I was looking for ways to feel better about myself. And getting better at the thing that I thought was the coolest thing in the world, and seeking feedback from people that it maybe was pretty ok, was my ticket through. And that’s what made BREAK happen.

RR: Are you able to briefly describe what this Sentinels album was? To what capacity did it exist in? CD-R, Dubbed cassettes? And was there a title for it, or was it just self titled?

Ginzuintriplicate: Sentinels was a 3-man unit, Jesse Dangerously as MaxField Stanton, myself as Ginzu3, and Dartmouth MC Jeff Blagdon as Naked J/Savage Poetic, that formed in 1998 to record the EP.

I’ll just jump into the story from 1997 because how Jesse and me first came together needs a whole other prequel trilogy to tell, but at that time were working on our first 4-track recording project together as a duo called Resurrection Brothers. He was from south end Halifax I was from suburban east Dartmouth, we had to ride an hour on the bus to get to each other’s places for maybe an hour or two of sample digging and recording, but we didn’t care. There was a crazy indie hip hop scene in Halifax at that time and all we wanted was to get into it.

We’d occasionally bring demo tracks to DJ Critical on The Treatment (at Dal college radio station CKDU) trying to get airplay, but word was slow to get around and album progress was maybe even slower, and I think that’s why we came up with an idea to do this one-off EP in the interim, recruiting Jeff who was a high school friend of mine from Dartmouth with a rep for cipher rapping.Jeff was already kind of in with DJ Loonie Tunes and his crowd, so that helped tie things together too.

So we decided to record the Sentinels project as a one-off EP as product to gain leverage for getting live shows, getting out names out. There was no intention to follow up this EP, Jesse and I planned to resume the Resurrection Brothers project afterwards. I’m pretty sure Jesse and I were performing at live shows before the Sentinels but given our age at the time it must have been all-ages venues, and I know we used the Sentinels EP as a springboard to get out and showcase a broader range of material we had.

The EP was 6 songs plus a beat and sample interlude tracks, called The Lying City EP. We were all 18 during the recording process, and the first run of CDs were released shortly before my 19th birthday. The original CD run and subsequent tape run were both professionally manufactured at a local facility in Dartmouth that a lot of hip hop folks used.It was sold on consignment at I think Revolution Records and Sam The Record Man on Barrington. Both times it was a small run of product, I think just like 30 units. The CD run and the cassette runs had completely different covers and liner inserts; The CD used an image from the manga Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita) and the cassette re-issue had a hand drawn cityscape image with a handstyle tag logo, all of which was taken off the flier from our first show at the Khyber.

Anyone who’s discussed this EP with me post-1999 knows I don’t have a lot positive to say about it, but at the time it had a fairly ok (in that the handful of folks who heard it mostly didn’t outright hate us) local reception and it got us on stages in Halifax. There were occasions where we’d combine a show with the Sentinels, Resurrection Brothers (just Jesse and I), and Jesse’s live band Yeshe 13 so that and our penchant for sometimes rhyming under different names from song to song I think contributed to some confusion about exactly who/what the Sentinels was.

Jesse Dangerously: The one and only Sentinels release was called “The Lying City EP.” It was released first as an edition of 50 professionally replicated cassette tapes, manufactured by the legendary MacMichael family at Put It On CD in Dartmouth, then shortly thereafter as 20 or 25 CD-Rs. The cassettes had paper labels printed by the manufacturer, and black & white photocopied covers, hand-drawn by Troy “Grymm Fett / ginzu333 / ginzuintriplicate” Manning. The CD-Rs were copied at Put It On CD but i think we did the cover as stolen colour photocopies.

RR: For those that haven’t heard it, myself included. Would you be able to describe the sound that you were going for? What were the major influencers at the time? Wu-Tang? Hiero? Black Moon?

Ginzuintriplicate: It’s hard to really answer that since our focus was specifically not to sound like anything out there at the time. All the names you dropped above and many more were influences on us personally no doubt, but not necessarily a direct influence on the sound we were making. I think we were on a sort of GraveDiggaz Prince Paul vibe of getting artists together for a wacky one-shot project. At that time Jeff in particular was a huge Redman head, I think that shows a bit in his rhymes (his performances are the best on the record IMO). I think it was always in the forefront that we needed to differentiate ourselves from other local performers, and this was a weird record in a scene that already had some out-there artists.

So sonically speaking the EP is not a what I’d call groovy record, it opens with a pretty high strung anthem, veers right into a truly awful tongue-in-cheek booty rap parody, then stays on a pretty dark and apocalyptic course the rest of the trip…a bit all over that map.A lot of grimy samples and lo-octave tones that are probably more of a Sebutones influence on us than we’d liked to have admitted at the time. There’s s a track called 666710 that’s chopped samples of level music from the Sega Genesis game Strider, which might give you an idea of how bugged out this was.

Jesse Dangerously: Those were all DEFINITELY in our immediate DNA at the time. More Gravediggaz and ODB than wu in general, but also wu in general. Also Kool Keith, Latyrx, the artists who were coming together as Anticon, and the local Halifax scene. Ginzu and I were especially influenced by the “mixtape style” of the Buck 65 Language Arts & Vertex albums, and The Sebutones’ 50/50 Where it Counts, and Sixtoo’s Psyche Intangible. Also The Goods, Tachichi, and Knowself… and Coolio. And Ice Cube. We loved rap!!

It’s also worth mentioning that even though our turntable skills are notably nascent, we were aesthetically influenced by a lot of rhe DJ and turntablist stuff coming out at that time. Invizibl Skratch Piklz, Return of the DJ, Kid Koala, DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist, plus locals who could represent. It impacted us!

I know the third member, Savage Poetic AKA Naked J, was really into The Roots, too. I think also Black Star? He had really good taste, I remember not appreciating some of his taste until later.

RR: Can we expect this tape to surface once again? Perhaps a Bandcamp upload, or even a physical re-release?

Ginzuintriplicate: The EP will never see an official re-release (from our camp) for a few reasons, not the biggest of which is that the masters are long gone. But we don’t want to re-release it for the same reason a lot of artists bury their earliest projects; it’s a product of a younger, more naive era where we hadn’t fully developed our cadence or our voice, let alone had a clear focus on what we were trying to say. At that time and place it worked as a means to help us get our names out there, get on stages and evolve forwards into the artists we would later become. But at the end of the day it’s a pretty amateur garage recording, not strong enough to stand as its own document and didn’t have a widespread enough release to warrant a re-issue now.

Jesse Dangerously: I would say not as such – Ginzu has pretty much exercised veto on it, refusing to stand behind his teenage bars. i know i would need to make some changes to look myself in the eye if i didn’t edit some of what i said… and some drums i jacked! haha

RR: What ever happened to Sentinels? Clearly Backburner became a thing as a larger collective, but The Sentinels as a duo; why not put out more work?

Ginzuintriplicate: Mostly just life and evolution (and as of the last decade geography), people’s paths go in different directions. Jeff is a super close friend of mine, basically family, we’ve always been/always will be tight, but in terms of music he just hasn’t walked that path in a long time. I have in my own archives an unreleased freestyle jam we did together in 1999, and he appeared on my long-lost solo demo tape Diaspora that same year too, but we didn’t really do much after that. Would he get back on the mic again? Never say never.

In the ’00’s and ’10’s Jesse and I collaborated on several tracks here and there and, despite us never name-dropping it, I think anyone who listens to those are listening an evolved Sentinels in spirit. As we got older and more experienced we gained a natural cadence for articulating a particular brand of cynicism that sort of fell flat on the EP. Obviously Jesse and me have kept a musical relationship considering I’m on his last and forthcoming records.We have sometimes batted around the idea of a 3-man re-union joint, at one point there was even a beat done, but life and all that just gets in the way.

Jesse Dangerously: Jeff “Savage Poetic” Blagdon was too busy with other stuff to commit, so Troy and i didn’t use the name without him. We were working on a second album, “Samarobryn,” when we got distracted making beats for Knowself, and i was drumming in a band. There’s still some really cool stuff on four track tapes from those sessions…

RR: Do you have any stories that take place within the recording of the project? Or shortly after during the limited promotional run?

Ginzuintriplicate: The record was split produced by Jesse and me, he did most of the digging/sampling and I did most of the beat arranging, except for 666710 which was completely done by me and the closing track on the EP which is a solo Jesse joint. It was recorded mostly in a shed/garage at his folks’ place near Quinpool road in Halifax. We hung a mic by a chord from the rafter of the garage, on group cuts all three of us stood around the one mic and did the backing vocals live with whoever was rhyming.

Our first show was at the Khyber with Loonie Tunez (the original, is another guy using a similar name now?) as the stage DJ and forever-dope DJ Moves turned out to spin records around the live set. People assumed the name “Ginzu” was taken from the Ginsu knife commercials, but it’s an irreverent reference to a character in the arcade game Captain Commando (1 quarter = Ginzu x 3), which itself is probably referencing the knife commercials so, yeah. I still have trouble deciphering my thought processes back then.

Jesse Dangerously: I remember playing our first show ever at the Khyber Club in 1998. Looney Tunez from Dartmouth was our DJ, but we just played the album through off the 4-track with the vocal channels muted.

Below are three songs as Ginzu has described “are taken from old liveaudio broadcast so that sound quality is in mono and super diminished.” This is the first time that these songs have been heard since the release of the project back in 1999. As per request of the artist, the ability to download has been disabled. But below you can listen, and form an idea of what this record sounded like at the time.

RR: DJ tapes were not exactly common place back then. I’m not sure of other producer albums that existed from this era. Were their models that you based it off of? What made you do this to begin with?

Moves: At that time CDs were more expensive to press than cassettes. So cassettes it was haha. Everyone was making tapes and I was still working with HCG. But I also had a treasure trove of beats backed up cause we were on the road soo much there wasn’t too much time to make new songs. So I asked friends to rap on beats and make my own album.

RR: How did you go about getting this on Ant? Did they press it up commercially to any degree? Was there shrink wrap? How many copies did they press?

Moves: Ant Records was friends of mine based out of Truro. Jay Lapointe and Dr Jon Hutt. They released some Sixtoo tapes and they wanted to release something from me. They made 100 copies I think. No shrink.

RR: Who is Bullshit Boo? He appears on the song ‘Minglin’ Out’.

Moves: Bullshit Boo was a character made from a guy in Truro we knew, who acted like he was someone big but we all knew he was just a liar. Cheklove Shakil was the rapper.

RR: You’ve successfully made this into a series as of now. (Congratulations btw on Vol. 3 being released!) Question is, did you have any intention on this being made into a series during the original conception?

Moves: No intent to make it a series at all. Lol.

RR: Do you have any stories regarding the recording of the project?

Moves: This project was recorded at Gordski’s apt in south end Halifax. On a cassette four track. Lots of fun times were had in the making of this tape. I recorded the Tour de Trance with Buck 65 at his place and seen the pic on the wall that I used for the Cock Dynamiks compilation I made. The idea came from that day and that pic Rich had. Lol.

Derek MacKenzie (M88Kenzie): That was Cory Bowles ( Check Love ) house. The Bible Hill Estates in Bible Hill Nova Scotia. Photo was taken by Catherine Stockhausen. Her and Chris Murphy of Sloan came to Truro to take some photos of us because we got signed to Sloan’s label Murderecords. We were still in High School and that was pretty big deal to us. Weird twist of fate with Cory’s old hood is that he returned decades later to direct episodes of the Trailer Park Boys in the same trailer park he grew up in. That’s kind of bad ass if you ask me.

RR: How much of the content on Trailer Park Hip-Hop was recycled from demo tapes such as The Art Tapes in 1992?

Derek MacKenzie (M88Kenzie): Hmmm, thats a good question and since it was such a long time ago I am not sure but I don’t think there was much overlap. We had all the songs written and we had preformed them a lot at house parties and school events before we had the chance to record those songs. We ended up recording the Trailer Park Hip Hop record in two weekends at a studio called Adinsound in Halifax.

RR: Can we talk about Stinkin’ Rich’s involvement on Jizz? This was really the first of his quote on quote “Uncle Climax” tracks. Picking him for THAT song, was that the type of rhymes he was kickin’ around that time? Did you know he would fit the part so to speak?

Derek MacKenzie (M88Kenzie): Haha, I think Rich thought the whole idea of the song was hilarious and he had no problem getting on Jizz. Don’t get it twisted, “uncle climax” was not just a fictional character. He was alive and well inside of Rich. He could get durty with his rhymes. He quite possibly influenced us to write that song. Who knows. We were all super close friends and supported each others projects. I still to this day love his verse on that track. I was talking about this the other day with some people who were at our shows back then. We would be playing all ages gigs and shooting “jizz” out of shaving cream bottles all over underage crowds……. Just happy cell phones were not around back then.

RR: Do you have any stories relating to the release of the album? Or promoting it shortly after its release? I imagine touring with Sloan and Len would have granted you many of these.

Derek MacKenzie (M88Kenzie): Honestly, this is too big of a question to answer. What story would you like to hear? There are so many epic insane nights. Lets just say that people would pay money to come and see what would happen at our shows. We were known to get a little “loose”. Len used to open up for us back then. Haha, There was a night in Edmonton with Len. The show was cancelled because of a stabbing at the venue the night before so the night ended up with Big Bear malt liquor, LSD, hells angles and a pyromaniac. Just another night for Hip Club Groove back then.

That was such a fun time. Everything was new. Every town, every venue, every band we had the pleasure to play with. Honestly, even after everything that happened after those years, I look back at these years with the biggest smile on my face. We were young and naive and that made it fucking perfect.